Bari Weiss Is the Latest Version of an Old Story

I don’t think I could say anything about Bari Weiss’ ineptitude, laziness, and sliminess that wasn’t already adequately covered in this scathing Last Week Tonight segment about her promotion to the head of CBS News. If you need a primer on who she is and what she’s done in her career, take the time to watch this video.

Weiss stepped in it this week by spiking a completed 60 Minutes story about the Trump Administration rounding up migrants and sending them to CECOT, a concentration camp in El Salvador, where the men were tortured and sexually abused. Weiss, because she’s never worked in TV news or been the editor-in-chief or a real journalism operation, pulled the segment only hours before it was supposed to air. She then made the clumsy argument that the story wasn’t ready because its reporting had been in other major publications (something 60 Minutes routinely does because they’re reporting for a TV news magazine audience rather than newspaper readers), and that the story couldn’t go forward unless they had comment from a government official like Steven Miller. This ignores the fact that the real journalists working on the story had already reached out to the government, received no comment, and that was the end of it. These flimsy excuses did little to mask that Weiss was doing the job she knew she was hired for: running interference for her boss, David Ellison, so he could receive friendlier oversight from a corrupt administration. 

As bad as Weiss has been, one of my first thoughts when this all erupted was how much Ellison mismanaged his own interests. His relationship with Weiss had nothing to do with respecting her work or thinking she was able to run a major news organization. It’s because he was susceptible to the one thing Weiss is actually good at, which is flattering wealthy conservatives and getting them to part with their money. That makes her an effective saleswoman, but by any measure, Ellison got hosed here. He paid $150 million for The Free Press, Weiss’ Substack publication of right-wing op-eds, that was never anywhere close to such a valuation based on its number of paying subscribers (to the surprise of no one, there aren’t over a million people willing to pay $100/year to read constant variations of “I’m a liberal but [liberal thing] annoys me”). If his goal was simply to take CBS, a major organization that was moderately critical of Trump, and neuter it, he still bungled that simple job because such censorship usually doesn’t create so much noise.

If he had been smarter about this, he would have plucked some editor from Fox News or a producer of one of their shows. This would be a person who would know how TV news operates, and which levers need to be pulled to launder a right-wing perspective. Instead, he chose Weiss because she flatters the sensibilities of someone like Ellison, someone who traipses around Hollywood liberals (Skydance produced all of the Mission: Impossible movies since the fourth one and constantly tried to revive other franchises to little effect, like G.I. Joe, Jack Ryan, and Terminator), but whose ideology is fundamentally conservative. Weiss fits neatly into that niche with her performance as “wronged liberal.”

Weiss is an easy story for elites who find conservatism an increasingly grotesque parade of bigots and know-nothings, but can’t swallow the coalition that has powered Donald Trump to two terms as President. That’s where Weiss comes in to tell a story: “I’m a liberal but…” In this telling, the powerful have never done anything wrong, but their hand was forced by overreaching liberals. Weiss makes this presentation easy. She’s Jewish, and she’s married to a woman, and by checking those demographic boxes, that’s enough to make you believe her conservative values were somehow thrust upon her rather than just a convenient repackaging of the same views you’d get from Tucker Carlson.

Weiss’ job isn’t to be a journalist, but a propagandist, and yet she’s way in over her head. While Weiss may not carry the grubby fingerprints of someone like Carlson, who happily platforms and promotes a vicious white supremacist like Nick Fuentes, she’s still supposed to launder what the Trump administration is doing into a friendly framework. Unfortunately for both Ellison and Weiss, she has no idea how to do this. The ceiling for a lot of these propagandists, whether it’s Weiss, Carlson, or those who came before them like William F. Buckley, Jr., is to take those who are most privileged and make them out to be the aggrieved party. Weiss didn’t want Steven Miller’s comment because it was impossible to tell the CECOT story without it; she wanted to present him and the administration in a favorable light as she’s always done. She wanted to, at best, both-sides the kidnapping and torturing of people, but she’s too incompetent to manage that because she’s a lazy opinion columnist. 

This would be like Les Moonves putting Michelle Malkin in charge of CBS News during the George W. Bush administration. It’s not difficult to find conservative reactionaries, and while Weiss has been able to dress up her project as an aggrieved millennial liberal, nothing she’s done in her career has been special or insightful. She’s not a strong writer, she’s not a deep thinker, and her true goal is to flatter the powerful while working to keep those truly suffering (for example, men sent to a concentration camp) diminished and ignored. The only major difference between those who came before is that she’s a product of the Trump Age, where the manifestly unqualified are elevated to positions of immense institutional power because they hold the “right” beliefs rather than possessing the knowledge to do the job. They know how to rail against the system, but once in charge of it, they flail about, unable to wield real power because they’ve never understood or appreciated any concept larger than their own ambition.

But as this week showed, this kind of approach has its limits. Just as Carlson has struggled to find the same level of popularity and influence after losing his Fox News show, Weiss doesn’t know how to handle anything that isn’t right-wing opinion slop. She’s a propagandist, but effectively censoring the CECOT story isn’t in her skill set, which is why she’s had to spend a holiday week defending a decision that only called more attention to the story she wanted to bury. Ellison thought he was getting someone so adept at the media landscape that she could turn to his ends. Instead, Weiss has proven she’s the same clumsy oaf as the countless, forgotten conservative columnists who came before her.